The Sydney quartet are releasing this, their second EP, on the eve of a UK tour, another sign of the band’s rising star status on the international stage. Of course, they’ve been the local talk of the town for a couple of years, building a solid following via their own shows and some fine support slots.

If EP was their calling card, their first real statement of intent beyond a couple of earlier singles, then EP2 is another step forward. It solidifies their reputation as incisive songwriters and fine players. They’ve got an ear to the ground but a widescreen songwriting vision.

Opener and first single ”Stingray bursts from the gates with a spray of guitar notes, sparkling and cascading over the nimble rhythm section. It’s a great example of the rush of energy they can invest in their songs, the retention of the rough edges to the music and the economy of their songs. Pop in structure but noisy and damn catchy by nature.

‘Free To Air’ initiallydials things back to a wistful and melancholic slice of dream pop before choppy drums and their swirling jangly guitars take flight. It’s a song apparently inspired by an old neighbour of Annabel Blackman’s and his life as witnessed remotely from her bedroom. Musically the song captures that mood of both intimacy and disassociated observation. ‘Insomnia’ inhabits a similar atmospheric place, the highlight being Blackman’s vocal melody which is heavy-lidded and drowsy yet still irresistibly catchy.

‘Sad Wax’ weaves more of the same snake charmer guitar lines into the song’s DNA but it lacks the same impact and physicality of the other songs on the EP. It’s a pleasant enough track but it sounds under-formed as it repeatedly circles the same musical idea without building or elaborating on it. The final track ‘UMA’ gets things back on track with a different sonic palette. The bass comes to the fore, leading the song into grungier territory akin to Pixies with a dash of Hole. It works wonderfully, all tension and quirks courtesy of shrieks and sneered, gang vocals, capping off an impressive batch of songs from a band that just keep getting better and better.

Some bands sound like their names and in the case of Wellington duo Diving their chosen moniker makes sense as the point where you hit the water and enter a submerged world and an altered state. Your vision is altered, your ears hear things differently as sounds are filtered aquatically and the world on the surface feels like a distant place.

Diving’s modus operandi is post-rock, often instrumental music that doesn’t adhere to traditional song structures, though these are songs, particularly Entropy the second of the four tracks on their debut EP. Tension is sustained and released, not unlike the rise and fall of waves where the patterns are punctuated by large peaks and deeper troughs. Its first four minutes sounds like the distant echo of Bailter Space but then things fragment and the music’s field of vision widens before more traditional rock shapes re-enter the fray and the central cascading riff drops heavily and repeatedly. It is an interesting angle that the pair have taken when they could have easily settled for the quiet /loud dynamics where bands try too hard to exploit those extremes and end up sounding cliched.

Diving have balanced their approach to their music, playing with both structure and some of the key signifiers of shoegaze and drone music via screes of effect-laden guitar, krautrock rhythms and plenty of momentum. Hypervoid has a great feel to it courtesy of Nick Erickson’s guitar textures but it doesn’t feel fully realised, wandering in its tentativeness like a practice room jam searching for a focal point. They make up for that misstep with the EP’s closing track, a wonderfully immersive piece called Synthstrom that is heavily indebted to Tortoise with its jazzy patterns and circling guitar shapes that build a swirling mood before things turn nasty courtesy of a snarling wah pedal. They must have been tempted to really stretch and cut loose but they don’t, instead they pull back again, controlling the mood rather than exploding it.

Too often two piece bands betray their numbers by sounding skeletal and with something missing sonically. Diving negate that completely making the duo aspect irrelevant and though an EP doesn’t give enough time to get fully immersed in their sound it introduces them as an exciting new duo who can hopefully expand on what they have created with Synesthesia and produce a great full length album.